THE NEEDIEST CASES; He Can Speak Now, and Sleep in His Own Bed

By ABBY AGUIRRE

Published: November 13, 2008

If you take him at his word, Caius Gillett is 200 years old, has been attending Public School 94 in the Bronx for 99 years and is secretly made of Legos.

''And I can build things, too!'' he adds, twirling around on one foot, arms outstretched.

His mother, Ardette Arnold, 44, offers a competing set of particulars: He is 7, in his second year at P.S. 94, 100 percent human and has a mother who is, for the moment, less impressed with the imagination that strings together his words than the fact that he can say them.

Caius was born with a cleft palate -- not the kind that causes a visible split of the upper lip, but an interior kind, not immediately apparent, that can result in feeding difficulties, frequent pain and, eventually, severe hearing and speech impediments.

At 3, when many children have been formulating sentences for a year or more, he could not pronounce any of the words he might have used to describe the excruciating earaches and nosebleeds he was experiencing by then.

The few words he attempted came out as fragments. Juice was ''uice.'' Milk was ''ilk.'' Grandma was ''ama.''

Ms. Arnold took her son to New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she was told that he had a submucous cleft palate, and then to the Children's Hospital at Montefiore, where, in February 2005, doctors performed surgery to close the hole in the roof of his mouth.

A few months after the operation, Ms. Arnold and Caius were walking down the street when a car roared by. Caius pointed.

''Car,'' he said.

Overwhelmed, Ms. Arnold stopped.

''Yes, Caius, car!'' she said.

Within months he was saying more advanced words, like ''oatmeal'' and ''brownies.'' Then came complete sentences. In the fall of 2006, he was transferred from a special education program in a school for the developmentally disabled to the local public school.

He said things that made his mother laugh: ''I'm here for my driver's license,'' he told the clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where Ms. Arnold was renewing her identification. He said things that tinged her daily departure for work with regret, like ''I wish J. C. Penney would fire you so you could be with me.''

One evening, as they were getting ready for bed in the apartment they shared with Ms. Arnold's mother and cousin -- where Ms. Arnold and Caius shared not only a bedroom but also a bed -- Caius turned to his mother.

''Momma, I want my privacy,'' he said.

Ms. Arnold was astonished.

''I had no idea where he learned the word,'' she said. ''I thought, maybe it is time to figure out how to give Caius his own space.''

Even with $200 a month in food stamps and $660 in Supplemental Security Income benefits for her son, Ms. Arnold's monthly income of about $700 meant that a two-bedroom apartment in New York was out of reach. She applied for Section 8 housing, received a voucher early this year and soon after moved into an apartment, for which she pays $491 of the $1,500 rent.

The apartment had two bedrooms, an open kitchen and a bright, airy living room. All it lacked was furniture.

With $1,185 from the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, Ms. Arnold bought a dresser and a second bed, as well as a dining table and a set of matching chairs.

It is on one of those chairs that Caius sits when he does his second-grade math homework and practices his cursive writing. It is also where he sits when he is absorbed in Roblox, a computer game. ''You can build a house,'' Caius explained, stacking blocks with a few taps of an arrow key. ''You can make things. You can buy things. You can be in a club. You can fly. You can die and come back to life.''

You can also, evidently, grow weary of adults asking you questions.

''O.K., no more talking,'' he says. ''I'm trying to build here!''

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